Small Company Cultivates Excellence
Pros
Horseless Cowboy was my first job out of college and I cannot thank them enough. It is because of them that I gained the skills, confidence, and resilience necessary to excel at my next/current job beyond them. When I joined HC, it was thriving with multiple studios recording every day. I quickly learned how to communicate with agents, actors, directors, and studio engineers to schedule -- all vital skills necessary to be successful in the casting and production world. Even after a large reduction in the volume of production we were working on, I was taught about what it really means to have a flexible, entrepreneurial mindset. This taught me to be self-directing in my work and research and to look for new information and opportunities where we could find work. These are crucial skills needed to survive in the current state of the entertainment industry, and ones that even helped me to survive layoffs at my current company because I honed and demonstrated them early on. Even though I have not been employed by Horseless Cowboy for about a year at the time of writing this, I am still in frequent contact with them. They create a culture where every person who steps through their doors will always be a part of it, creating a large web of connections, certainly for industry networking but also in certain cases, friendship. The people at HC want to see the people that are part of their "posse" succeed, even long after they've directly worked with the company.
Cons
While I was thankful to be a salaried employee, I was often working outside the bounds of a traditional 9-6, often staying up late to finish paperwork, catalog files, and confirm bookings with actors/agents. While I have come to understand that there are certain jobs where these kind of hours can be expected, I wish that these expectations had been communicated earlier. While the company culture cultivates excellence, and I am grateful for what it instilled in me, it was rough at times getting there with near-impossible standards to achieve. Sometimes it felt that falling short of perfect was a dire mistake. As a small company, it isn't one that has a lot of opportunity for growth. While not necessarily bad, is just something to be aware of. Working here means to train to be the best candidate for your next opportunity.
